own story cycle. The band of heroes from the Enfeoffment of the Gods had dedicated readers. Even the magistrate Judge Bao appeared in these story cycles as a comic eccentric, a master of disguise.23 Of course, readers and listeners thrilled to the epic cycle Shuihu zhuan, or Water Margin. They knew precisely the weaponry, the costumes, the strategies, and the famous lines of all 108 heroes. When Russian diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovelevsky perused the bookstores of Beijing in 1850, he found that the “back rows of the (book) shops are usually crowded with novels … The greatest fame is enjoyed by the old novels, which are reprinted in hundreds of editions.”24 He was right, as we know from the numbers. Aside from the storyteller scripts and storyteller imitations, there were the smoothly narrated novels, and then there were reprints, sequels, and spin-offs, with single chapters expanded into new books entirely. This was a good crop to harvest. No wonder Guo Xiao ting came out with The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, Part II, in 1900.
The picaresque tales that flew off the back shelves were not always well received by the court, however. Imperial censors, in fact, found the “old novels” to be deeply troublesome. Light-hearted and comical though they may be, novels were considered polluting. Censors looked at fiction and saw rebellion. Novels had a terrible reputation. Water Margin, though a favorite throughout the Qing, was subjected to heavy-handed censorship. Ambassador Kovelevsky, in his visit to the Beijing bookstore, may have noticed the numbers, but he did not notice the laws. The Laws and Codes of the Great Qing (Da Qing lǜli 大清律例) labeled the book “licentious”; adventure tales undermined that well-ordered cityscape laid out in the police survey. The Qing legal code was clear: “All bookshops that print the licentious story Water Margin must be vigorously sought out, and the work prohibited. Both the woodblocks and the printed matter should be burned. In case [it is discovered that] this book is being made, and … should [an official] himself engrave it, he shall be stripped of office entirely.”25
If the officials monitored publishers, they monitored ordinary citizens as well. The reading public for these tales of adventure had an official category: “stupid” (yu 愚). Those who bought vernacular texts or who listened to storytellers were called yufuyufu (愚夫愚婦)26—stupid men and stupid women. This official view was more than demeaning, it was damning. The word “stupid” (yu 愚) had the connotation of politically dangerous, as in stupefying, deluding, or corrupting. Officials laced their descriptions of local leaders with such terms, accusing them of yumin (愚民), deluding the masses. The empire’s unsavory elements were bracketed together: the practitioners of cults, the malcontents, the tumultuous, as well as the writers and readers of fiction.
This fearful view of popular fiction was not without real bite. Popular fiction and all books were monitored with malign precision. Censors had terrible means at their disposal. When the Abbreviated History of the Ming History was published, censors were repelled by some few passages. The author foolishly linked the Manchu people to other “barbarian” peoples. The book itself was quickly suppressed, but the censorship was extended. Those connected with the project were tracked down. The publishers were tried, convicted, and executed, and “those who had merely purchased the book” were punished as well. “Seventy individuals were put to death and their families exiled, their estates confiscated.”27 This is censorship at an impressive level.
The imperial watchdogs and culture police were a ready posse. Fiction could stir up rebellion. In this, as it turns out, they were right. Readers of Qing fiction were truculent. They mimicked their heroes, used gangster argot, practiced swordplay, and gathered and plotted against the state. Mimicry was not the only issue, however. Heroes of the picaresque were considered gods. Ji Gong, in particular, was an unruly saint. The same Boxer rebels who surrounded Beijing in 1900 practiced the cult of Ji Gong.28 Missionary observers had seen young Boxer soldiers in cult practices: “After greeting the deities and taking their places respectfully on either side of the altar, the little boys suddenly began to look sickly, with red faces and staring eyes; they foamed at the mouth; they began to shout and laugh.”29 These rituals inspired the Boxers. Northern China was a vast terrain of the displaced and desperate; flood, disease, and imperial incompetence had created an impoverished and unstable population, a mob of “hungry, discontented, hopeless idlers,” as the American ambassador noted.30 This northern mob, however, coalesced through cult practices. Ji Gong and other heroes of the waterways and greenwood gave them divine legitimacy.
Vibeke Bordahl has traced the long histories of “schools”—the specific lines—of storytellers. She has collected performance lineages going back as many as seventy-eight generations. Storytellers of Water Margin passed down their knowledge in one famous clan for two hundred years.31 The Ji Gong stories have had their own great lineage. From storyteller performances to storyteller scripts, to smooth narratives by Qing writers, to contemporary movies, and then to TV shows, Ji Gong has lasted a millennium. He has, in fact, fared better than Confucius. Not that this is surprising. When the court and its revered texts and malign proclamations were abandoned, the oral tradition survived. Performers retained the lore of Ji Gong in their prodigious memories. Nor was Ji Gong a mere entertainer. Though he may be charged with the crime of comedy, his signature off-kilter view is compelling. Indeed, off-kilter has its uses. His anarchical intelligence offers us a refracted view of a difficult age, an age of corrupted authority and unmoored lives—a world in which the Empress had to flee the city dressed as a peasant. The late Qing was not a time for the great lions of history, but was “a world too numbed for tragedy and too disillusioned for glory.”32 Comedy sits in that vacuum, providing an apparently blithe view from the sidelines.
Günter Grass revealed that he preferred the style of the “Spanish and Arab picaresque”; the jester’s version reflects the world “in concave and distorting mirrors.”33 Indeed, the picaresque attracts those who live with violence. The talent of the jester for comical escape, offers a model, if not of victory, then at least of survival, as playing the rogue offers useful cover.
Victoria Cass
Baltimore, Maryland
Footnotes
1. Meir Shahar, Crazy Ji, Chinese Religion and Popular Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), 24.
2. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 117.
3. Susan Naquin, Peking, Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (University of California Press, 2000), 638.
4. Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), 101.
5. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley, University of California Press), 104.
6. Naquin, Peking, 641–643.
7. Alison Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 4 (November 1993): 896.
8. Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” 896.
9. Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” 889, note 2.
10. John Bell (1691–1780), Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Parts of Asia, volume II (Glasgow, University of Edinburgh), 54.
11. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 116.
12. Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke, A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2110 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), 18–21.
13. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 116–118.
14.
